Like the horrible aftertaste that comes from throwing up the contents of one’s stomach after a night of binge drinking, the ratings agencies have reared their ugly heads again. David Beers, head of S&P’s government debt rating unit, announced Friday night that S&P has downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time, from AAA to AA. It’s a sham: S&P’s whole analytical framework reflects ignorance about modern money. If the US government, Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, capitulate to this outrageous act of economic extortion, it will effectively be sanctioning a beer hall putsch by the rentier class.

Don’t you love the cool, controlled, understatement of the British?

Digby makes an important distinction in her post, Yes, both sides are wrong: the Democrats are wrong for accepting the Republican framing that the deficit was the most important problem the economy faced. They should have been focusing on jobs, but diverted their attention to the deficit, and gave away the tools necessary to create jobs.

Leon Panetta is upset about the possibility of further cuts to the Defense Budget, saying it would harm our security. Garbage!

There is no justification in terms of threats to the US for the billions wasted on the Missile Defense System. The system has never passed a real-world test, and only passed a bare majority of the fraudulent ‘tests’ that were designed to prove its success.

Not only does it not work, major portions of the infrastructure for the system are going to need major work to repair shoddy initial construction that was hurried to meet a deadline.

You save money by eliminating systems, not trimming around the edges.

The F-35 needs major scrutiny because all of the ‘working’ examples have just been grounded again because of problems with its ground power system. This happened before and was supposedly faulty maintenance procedures, but it has occurred again after the procedures were changed.

This program is so over time and budget, that many of the countries that signed on are looking at alternatives before they lose their air forces. Locally there is a wing of personnel polishing the seats of office chairs because they have only one recently arrived aircraft to work on and none they can fly.

We spend all this money, and can’t seem to supply the people on the ground the tools they need to actually do their jobs.

"A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them."

Mark Twain

"There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

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